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Farm bill to get lame-duck treatment

FARM BILL TO GET LAME-DUCK TREATMENT: With less than four days for Congress to pass a new farm bill before the current law expires after Sunday, top ag lawmakers now readily admit they’ll likely have to finish their work after the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

That timing isn’t surprising — there’s been more sniping among House and Senate negotiators than there’s been signs of progress over the last month. But failure to meet the Sept. 30 deadline would still be a defeat for ag leaders who said they were determined to finish a new farm bill on time and provide some needed certainty to farmers and ranchers.

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Hoping for better luck in November: Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said he hopes negotiators will make enough progress to vote on a final farm bill, H.R. 2 (115), the first week after the election, Pro Ag’s Helena Bottemiller Evich and Catherine Boudreau reported Wednesday night.

Waiting until the lame duck is a gamble — political leverage would shift significantly if Republicans lose the House or Senate. Some farm bill conferees are warning that waiting until November will add a whole new level of complexity to the negotiations. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said Wednesday there “may not be a political will to get it done” after the midterms, as your host wrote on Wednesday.

Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, top Democrat on the House Ag panel, says he’s not interested in writing a new farm bill if Democrats sweep into the House majority and he takes over the gavel from Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas). “I want it done now, and Roberts wants it done now. We’re not the ones holding this up,” Peterson told POLITICO this week.

A long to-do list: Not a single farm bill title had been finalized as of Wednesday, Conaway said. And it’s not just the well documented standoff over stricter work requirements for millions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients that’s bogging down the talks. Issues like commodity and energy policy, and how to pay for various proposals, are also to blame.

HAPPY THURSDAY, SEPT. 27! Welcome to Morning Ag, where your host was not surprised to read that D.C.’s beloved speed cameras issued more than 1 million tickets totaling $104 million in fines last year — and the city is expected to shatter those records again this year. Send your tips, news and traffic camera rants to [email protected] or @ryanmccrimmon, and follow the whole team @Morning_Ag.

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FDA TO STEP UP FOOD RECALL DISCLOSURES: Too slow. Not transparent enough. Overly deferential to manufacturers and retailers. That’s how critics have described FDA’s oft-maligned food recall system. Now the agency is taking another stab at addressing those complaints by moving toward posting information about retailers carrying food products that have been recalled.

Draft guidance released by the agency Wednesday laid out specific cases in which FDA would publicize the names, addresses and other information about stores carrying potentially tainted foods. Food safety advocates — including some frequent critics of FDA’s recall system — hailed Wednesday’s move as a win for transparency.

It’s a notable shift from current policy. FDA has traditionally left it up to manufacturers to alert retailers when their food products have been recalled — agency officials believed publicizing which retailers had contaminated foods could violate protections for trade secrets.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, in contrast, routinely posts the retail stores where contaminated meats were sold. (FSIS oversees meat and poultry recalls, while FDA handles the rest of the food supply.)

An FSIS spokeswoman said the agency “has been posting recall information on its website for almost two decades, including the names of retailers and addresses that have received any affected product.”

Stacking them up: Eskin told your host the FDA proposal appears to be even broader than FSIS’ policy, because the potential retail disclosures wouldn’t be limited to “Class I” recalls — cases in which the tainted products could be deadly.

On the other hand: Thomas Gremillion, director of the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Policy Institute, backed the move but said the guidance should have gone farther and leaves too many decisions to FDA officials’ discretion.

TRUMP LAUNCHES U.S.-JAPAN TRADE TALKS: If high-stakes negotiations with Mexico, Canada, China and the EU weren’t enough for trade watchers to juggle, the U.S. will officially start discussing a two-way trade deal with Japan — one of President Donald Trump’s top trade goals after he ditched the multinational Trans-Pacific Partnership. Take note, aggies: Sources briefed on the plans told Pro Trade’s Adam Behsudi that agriculture could be at the center of a potential U.S.-Japan trade pact, along with automobiles.

Japan said the market access it has given to foreign ag imports in earlier trade deals would “constitute the maximum level” of what it would offer the U.S. Adam has more here on the coming trade talks.

On the NAFTA front: The Trump administration is set to send Congress the final text of a two-way trade deal with Mexico, which is due by Sept. 30 under trade promotion authority rules. It appears all but certain Canada won’t be included in the agreement at this point. That’s renewed questions about whether a bilateral deal with Mexico would qualify for fast-track protections under TPA — and if lawmakers would support replacing NAFTA with a two-way pact.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the administration is “on track” to submit the paperwork to Congress on time, as Adam writes. That’s expected to happen as soon as Friday.

Trump publicly unloaded on the Canadians on Wednesday, blaming them for being inflexible on sticking points like U.S. access to their dairy markets. “He doesn’t seem to want to move,” Trump said of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a news conference in New York. The president also knocked an unspecified Canadian trade official, adding, “We don’t like their representative very much.” That could have been a reference to Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who has led the NAFTA talks for Canada.

The Canadians apparently aren’t sweating their situation — at least not publicly. Trudeau said his nation has a “broad range of alternatives” if the three-way deal does fall through, Pro Trade’s Doug Palmer reports from New York.

Private sector weighs in today: Members of the 28 congressionally mandated private-sector trade advisory committees are expected to notify USTR today of their verdicts on the available details from the preliminary U.S.-Mexico agreement, per our Morning Trade colleagues.

Hill watch: Lighthizer is scheduled to meet today with the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles trade policy, according to congressional sources. A trio of Democrats on the panel, each with a significant dairy presence in their districts, wrote to Lighthizer on Wednesday asking him to slow down the NAFTA process and find a resolution to the dairy dispute that has hamstrung the U.S.-Canada talks.

TALE OF TWO TRADE FORECASTS FOR FARMERS: As the U.S. ag sector reels from low commodity prices and retaliatory tariffs, a key question in farm world is whether Trump’s hard-line trade strategy will eventually yield dividends — in other words, will short-term pain lead to long-term gain? Trump and Heitkamp, who talk about trade as much as almost anyone in Washington, offered starkly different answers to that question in separate public remarks.

The president’s case: On Wednesday, he predicted his trade moves would open up new markets for U.S. agricultural products that have been closed off for years. “I’m opening up markets like nobody’s ever opened markets before,” Trump told reporters in New York.

He also went off on China during a U.N. Security Council meeting for “attempting to interfere” in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections by slapping retaliatory tariffs on American food and ag products, as POLITICO’s Ramsen Shamon writes. Farmers have made up a central part of Trump’s political base, making them an easy target for other countries seeking leverage over the president.

Wednesday Trump tweet: “China is actually placing propaganda ads in the Des Moines Register and other papers, made to look like news. That’s because we are beating them on Trade, opening markets, and the farmers will make a fortune when this is over!”

Not so fast: Heitkamp told a group of produce-growers Wednesday that losing access to countries like China amid the tariff standoff will be a long-term disaster if foreign buyers move on to other sources of crops like soybeans and don’t come back.

“That’s a market that our growers through the checkoff program have grown over 30 years,” the North Dakota Democrat said at an event hosted by the United Fresh Produce Association. “Thirty years of convincing them that we can be the reliable, high-quality, lower-cost provider.”

“It takes less than two years to lose a market,” she told the group.

China has already sought to replace its massive U.S. soybean supply by turning to other major exporters like Brazil, lowering the protein content of its animal feed and leaning on alternative crops.

ROW CROPS:

— House clears continuing resolution for Trump’s signature: The House passed a broad spending package, H.R. 6157 (115), including a CR to keep the lights on at government agencies including USDA and FDA after Sept. 30. Trump said Wednesday he’ll sign the bill into law, despite some misgivings. Pro Budget’s Jennifer Scholtes has the details.

— North Carolina pegs hurricane-related ag damage at $1.1 billion: Hurricane Florence inflicted more than $1 billion in damage on North Carolina farmers, the state’s agriculture department estimated Wednesday. That number includes $987 million in damaged row crops and $23 million in livestock, poultry and aquaculture losses.

— Farm Bureau seeks national WOTUS injunction: The American Farm Bureau Federation and other business groups are asking a Georgia district court for a nationwide injunction on the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States rule. The court has already halted implementation of the rule in 11 states. Pro Energy’s Annie Snider has the story.

— House passes $1.7 billion in Florence relief: The House on Wednesday passed an FAA reauthorization measure, H.R. 302 (115), that included an emergency aid package to help states like the Carolinas rebuild after Hurricane Florence. It’s the first of several disaster-relief bills that are expected to bolster recovery efforts after Florence, Pro Budget’s Sarah Ferris writes.

— Fed raises rates, sees 3 percent growth: U.S. farmers will be paying more in interest when they borrow money for equipment and other needs after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the third time in 2018 — and indicated it will do so again later this year. The Fed also estimated U.S. economic growth will exceed 3 percent in 2018. Pro Financial Services’ Victoria Guida explains the numbers and context.

— Counterpoint: Farmer optimism is way up: A survey from DTN/The Progressive Farmer found that farmer optimism about their business health and outlook, and the state of U.S. agriculture, is now higher than it was in the spring and at this time last year. The “extremely surprising” results were attributed to farmers adapting to the current climate and remaining hopeful about future results.

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About The Author : Ryan McCrimmon

Ryan McCrimmon is an agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro, where he covers the farm economy, agricultural trade, federal spending on food and farm programs and other ag issues. He also writes the daily Morning Agriculture newsletter.

Before joining POLITICO, Ryan was a budget and tax reporter for CQ/Roll Call and covered Texas state politics for the Texas Tribune in Austin. Ryan graduated from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism, Middle Eastern politics and Arabic. He also covered Big Ten sports for the Northwestern News Network and Big Ten Digital Network

Ryan was born and raised in Charlottesville, Va. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his dog Bailey and loves playing basketball, making music and traveling to national parks.